IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 to replace a program called MUT (MultiUser Talk) on a BBS called OuluBox at the University of Oulu in Finland, where he was working at the Department of Information Processing

 ...

IRC is an open protocol that uses TCP and, optionally, TLS. An IRC servercan connect to other IRC servers to expand the IRC network. Users access IRC

 ...

Issues in the original design of IRC were the amount of shared state data being a limitation on its scalability, the absence of unique user identifications leading to the nickname collision

 ...

Client software
Client software exists for various operating systems or software packages, as well as web-based or inside games. Many different clients are available for the various operating systems, including Windows,

 ...

IRC still lacks a single globally accepted standard convention for how to transmit characters outside the 7-bit ASCIIrepertoire. IRC servers

 ...

Much like conventional P2P file sharing, users can create file servers that allow them to share files with each other by using customised

 ...

There are numerous search engines available to aid the user in finding what they are looking for on IRC. Generally the search engine consists of two parts, a "back-end" (or

 ...